Dazzle Ship sets DRL drone racing off on its path to sporting glory

Neon environments and high-speed crashes. London creative production studio, Dazzle Ship, is making sure that the Drone Racing League becomes a sport with as many fans as possible.

Dazzle Ship has captured the new sport’s thrills in more than 20 creative assets, ranging from the design identity to broadcast bumpers, lower-third graphics, the DRL leaderboard and digital ads.

DRL is the first-ever professional race series for first-person-view (FPV) drone racing. It brings together the world’s best pilots to fly DRL Racer 2 quadcopters head-to-head through neon-lit environments in the quest for the planet’s best FPV pilot.

The sport kicked off in January 20-16 with a DRL YouTube teaser that accumulated almost two million views.

For the sport’s second season this year, DRL hosted global events that culminated in a World Championship, watched on screens throughout the world via ESPN and Sky Sports.

From a creative perspective, branding a sport that doesn’t yet exist beyond the imagination of a few individuals was a challenging task, Dazzle Ship admitted.

One of its biggest hurdles was striking a balance between educating viewers on the real-world aspect of the sport – this isn’t CG; crashes are real – while transporting them into a futuristic science fiction environment that would represent the experience of drone racing.

Dazzle Ship was invited to collaborate with DRL after chief executive officer, Nick Horbaczewski, saw the studio’s work in a showcase of the world’s best Maxon Cinema 4D users. The two teams then developed the striking creative hand-in-hand, over a 12-month period.

“This is a very exciting day for Dazzle Ship,” stated Alex Donne-Johnson, Dazzle Ship founder.

“Drone racing is an incredible new concept, and we had the chance to create a blueprint of what it stands for: a cutting- edge new sport at the forefront of technology. We approached this one- of-a-kind project with the goal of connecting the DRL to a new worldwide fanbase.

“For the aesthetic, we had to deliver fresh visuals that embodied the persona of a futuristic sport. For the narrative, we had to take a very complex topic and simplify it – something that has become a specialist skill of ours.”

“With the help of Dazzle Ship, DRL has introduced a new sport to audiences around the world, delivering the passion for racing, science fiction-inspired content and competition to a new generation of sport fans,” added DRL spokesperson, Ben Johnson.